Pigtails.

You are familiar already, I am sure of it, with the phrase “to boil a frog“.

According to the story – and you know this, too – if you drop a frog down, with a plop, into a pot of boiling water, then that frog will simply hop right back out again. But if you were to instead place that same frog down gently into a pot filled with tepid water, and then gradually bring it to a boil on the stove, then the frog remains in the pot, oblivious to the rising mortal danger, until it has been cooked alive.

Literary and rhetorical critics have a proper term for stories like this. An apalogue is a brief, pithy narrative meant to assert or express one’s moral (or other) arguments, but in a pleasing and indirect manner. Indeed, the entire purpose of the thing is to get some given moral claim across, and so distortions and exaggerations will commonly feature in such stories. Aesop’s Fables contain many other examples, only no one calls them “Aesop’s Apologues”. I assume this is the end result of some globe-spanning and centuries-old conspiracy to annoy me, and me specifically.

The “boiling frog” of the story is rubbish, of course; by now, people have tried dropping the frogs, and they report that when you drop a frog into boiling water, they usually just die. And when you place one down gently in a pot of tepid water… well, then they just hop out anyways. Frogs are like that, sometimes. Here in our shared reality, they are normally capable of thermoregulation, a trait frogs share (to some degree) with most known forms of sentient life. But that isn’t really the point.

The point is that this myth of the “boiling frog” persists in our culture – against all the howling pedants of the world – largely thanks to its rhetorical usefulness. The story is a warning against complacency, and is often invoked wherever the immediate and perceptible changes arising from some perceived threat might only be gradual or slight.

Whether or not this is actually the right argument to be making in a given moment is another question – and largely, one of taste. Still, I was a bit surprised to learn, after going through the archives of this blog to check, that I haven’t used it myself here in the past. It feels like I bring that one up all the time.

Snaaake, a snake, oooh, it’s a snaaake…

Anyways. There is another famous apologue that I wanted to discuss, one with which you may be unfamiliar, but which seems destined to enter our shared public lexicon sooner rather than later. It is widely credited to Horst Siebert, an eminent German economist, who popularised it with his 2001 book, “Der Kobra-Effekt“. Siebert used this phrase, and the apologue that attends it, to illustrate a concept that economists have a proper term for: “perverse incentive“. In simple terms, this is when you set up some reward (or incentive) structure/system, in order to accomplish some goal, but instead you wind up even further away from your target, or else you make some other problem unexpectedly worse. Examples of “perverse incentives” abound in the real world – as do the many varied “cobra effects” that these can produce.

The story behind “cobra effects” goes something like this: in the days of the British Raj, the colonial government in India became concerned about the number of deadly, venomous cobras on the streets of Delhi. So, the British governors make an offer to the people of Delhi: for each dead cobra you bring to us, we will pay a bounty. And for a while, this policy seems to work out just as intended; many cobras are collected, and the British pay out even more in bounties than they had initially planned. Some begin to feel that they see fewer cobras on the streets. And yet… well, there were still cobras on the streets. Soon, rumours begin to spread of some enterprising folks who have taken up snake-breeding, raising cobras in captivity just to kill for the bounties. When these rumours reach the British governors, they elect to scrap their cobra-bounty policy altogether. And when the bounty is scrapped, the snake-breeders – who, for the purposes of this story, were actually real – simply freed the now-worthless snakes they had been raising. As a result, the cobra population in Delhi exploded, and the problem of deadly snakes in the streets was made worse than ever.

As far as digestible moral anecdotes go, this one is… fine. It’s fine. But as an apologue for the harms that a perverse incentive can wreak, “cobra effects” is – this is my opinion, and with all due respect – just lousy. I do not find it lousy simply (or rather, only) because the anecdote I just relayed is a more-or-less total fabrication, as has been thoroughly and repeatedly shown (most recently and perhaps most thoroughly by the Friends of Snakes Society). No, like the fabled boiling frog, “cobra effects” might have been deemed too useful to lose – troubling colonial overtones and all – if this narrative expressed its more fundamental arguments, suasively. I find it lousy as an apologue because it does not.

The problem, to my mind, is that within the context of systems thinking, this narrative might lead one to conclude (sensibly, even) that the snake-breeders are to blame for all these new cobras on the streets of Delhi – the “cobra effects” – whereas the point, the vital point is that the British are at fault, because they introduce a “perverse incentive” in the form of a cobra-bounty. Invariably, “cobra effects” stem from some regulatory failure, and “regulating things” is the jealously guarded purview of leadership; of management. The purpose of a system is what it does.

I believe that is the point, at least. I would argue this more strongly if I could, but sadly, and no official English translation of Der Kobra-Effekt has yet been published, and I am ill-equipped to understand three hundred pages of German. Further complicating matters is the fact of Herr Siebert’s death in 2009, and so we can expect no further comment from him on the subject.

Be that as it may, Siebert’s “cobra effects” have by this point in time slithered their way out of economics, and into the broader public vernacular. If Google Trends reports are anything to go by, there seems to be growing global interest in “perverse incentives” in general, and “cobra effects” appears to have become the prevailing mental shorthand for the unintended harms that these can bring about.

I would also note that these same Google Trends reports suggest a somewhat low search interest in these terms and topics amongst Canadian users, relative to those in other similar nations. It is as if though this were some rhetorical blind-spot in the “Canadian” mind. Either that, or my information is bad. Here it is, or was:

Thankfully, pop culture affords us with its own case-study in perverse incentives. I am thinking of the so-called “Streisand effect“, wherein an attempt to suppress or censor information can lead it to greater publicity and exposure. There was a rather fascinating research paper, published in Marketing Science this year, which suggests that a book that faces some local or even state-level organised “book ban” in the United States will see, on average, a twelve per cent bump in its circulation. In seeking to limit and proscribe certain speech, “book bans” instead tend to amplify it. The obvious conclusion one draws is that “book bans” are great for book sales, and that any jobbing writer should, under these circumstances, be actively courting organised efforts to have their speech proscribed. Willies willies cocks, trans rights cock climate change.

Or consider the example of this past week, where an ad campaign on U.S. network television – paid for by the Government of Ontario (at a reported cost of ~$54 million USD) to express opposition to Donald Trump’s tariff policies – has apparently so enraged the Usonian President that he thunders for all trade talks with Canada, his state’s second-largest national trading partner, to be “HEREBY TERMINATED“. Meanwhile, he donates tens of millions of dollars worth of free attention – we marketing pricks call this “earned media” – to the Ontarioan campaign and its message, which now garners both national and international headlines (plus think-pieces, detailed explainer guides, etc.). With each fresh late-night social media temper-tantrum he has throws, Trump draws an ever larger gaze towards this (apparently, quite impactful) line of critique. Analogies to the biblical Goliath, and David with his sling, are not unwarranted.

But the point I was getting at is this: it seems likely that we can expect to encounter many novel species of “cobra effects” in the days ahead, especially insofar as Usonian politics are concerned. “Perverse incentive” is, and has been, the polite and proper term to describe so much of what is currently happening, and why it’s likely to end in tears someday soon enough. I am suggesting that the public (and Canadians in particular) have need for some shared, common language to discuss these. I am further suggesting that it would be preferable if this shared vocabulary did not reinforce outmoded colonial stereotypes, or lead us towards false conclusions as to the nature of the problem, or both.

Hogging the attention

In that spirit, I would propose the adoption of “pigtails” (or “pigtail effects”, if you like) as a direct, swap-in, find-and-replace-all alternative to “cobra effects”. My first rationale is the story behind the term – the apologue – which I will relate in a moment. It is similar to the story behind “cobra effects”, but with certain key distinctions, and it even has the added persuasive benefit of being mainly true. My second rationale is mnemonic: the first two letters of “pigtail” (in English, at least) are the same as the initials for Perverse Incentive. My third rationale is a corollary observation: that if one ever seeks to find the “root” of a pigtail, they cannot be surprised if they discover, at the bottom of things, that it was always just some arsehole. Ahem:

Wild pigs are invasive to North America, and the ways they live and forage can be acutely destructive to their environs. They root up the forests. They root up the fields. They can even root up the streets, if they get it into their minds to do it. And for a period of about sixty years, soldiers on a U.S. Army base named Fort Benning (on the Georgia side of the Georgia-Alabama border) had been reporting trouble with the pigs who roam about that place. By the late ’00s, it was estimated that about six thousand wild pigs lived on the grounds of the army base.

And so the U.S. Army assigned an officer – one Maj. Bobby Toon – to sort this problem out. Somebody dubbed him the “Pig Czar” of Fort Benning, and the nickname stuck. At first, the Major called in some contractors; these were civilians. “We want to get rid of the pigs”, he told them, and after a little while, some contractors replied, “we can do it for you; here is what it will cost.”

But the Major – himself an avid hunter – felt that the quoted prices were too high, or that the contractors were being greedy. Besides, he thought, there were two thousand other people licensed to hunt on the grounds of the base already. That’s just three pigs for every licensed hunter. And so, in June 2007, a new bounty program was announced: for every pig’s tail turned in at Fort Benning, the United States Army would issue a payment of forty dollars.

Over the next nine months (June 2007–February 2008), about eleven hundred wild pigs were killed – that is, bounties were paid – at a total cost of about $57,000USD (of which bounties made up about $45,000). And yet, over that same timeframe, a population study conducted on the wild sounders in two areas of the base found that the hogs were more numerous and healthier than ever. The pigs were positively thriving!

Now, it was about this time (or perhaps earlier) that rumours started circulating of some “bounty hunters” who had been going around to local meat processors, buying up pig tails from these sources, and turning these in for the bounties. There might even have been a kernel of truth to those rumours… but even that would not explain why the pigs were now faring quite as well as they were. What was going on at Fort Benning?

Almost ten full years would go by before this population study was published, and the researchers shared their own hypothesis with the world. They believed that it was the local hunters’ practice of “feed-baiting” wild hogs which created a more abundant food supply, and thus greater reproduction, than might otherwise have occurred. Additionally, they observed that many local hunters prioritised the killing of larger, older, male “trophy” hogs, rather than females or juveniles (even where the per-tail bounties would be identical). As some civilian contractor might have told the good Major, culling the mature males alone will not especially threaten the survival of a sounder. The rest can manage just fine.

In any event, the U.S. Army opted to keep its pig-tail bounty in effect, for a few more seasons at least. Today, wild pigs still roam free in and around Fort Benning. But the Major did once get to bring Gordon Ramsay out on a hunting trip (plus his video production crew), so at least there was that.

Getting back into my lane

In closing – and to maintain the thin veneer of this still being a professional blog – it behooves me to return to the subject of digital advertising. Let’s discuss one last “perverse incentive” that I encounter in my own working life all the time.

Someone out there wants to advertise; they are the principal, and they often hire an agent, and so these two parties have an agency problem on their hands. What is the incentive structure? Well, for simplicity’s sake, it is often arranged such that the agency will be paid some fixed percentage of the “ad buy”, or direct media spend, to administer the campaign. That is simple enough.

But would you believe – can you imagine? – that the advice of such an agency will often boil down to “… and that’s why we should raise the media budget”? Or that an agency under this fee structure will rarely, if ever, recommend that the spend be reduced? Even when the agent sees clear, obvious signals that this is the most impactful “optimisation” to be feasibly made?

No wonder, then, that the average advertiser’s media spend tends to creep upwards, just as the profits of Alphabet and Meta – a functional duopoly in online advertising – continue to rise, unabated. In recent years, some online marketers have (belatedly) rediscovered the idea of incrementality… but you shall never hear this word uttered by any agency that works on a fixed percentage of ad-spend, unless they absolutely have to.

Or suppose that some other advertiser offers to pay some other agent for some fixed number of hours per week to manage their campaigns, so long as these are in-flight. Whether this scope of time and effort is well-suited to the task at-hand hardly enters into it. But would you believe me if I told you that under this incentive, “Parkinson’s law” tends to rear its head, and the work tends to fill up whatever time has been granted for it? Small wonder, then, that the “management” of such campaigns often tends towards the minimum viable product, combined with some form of corporate theatre, of technical make-work, which borders on alchemy – and with similar results.

Pigtails are everywhere, once you know what to look for. Perhaps you’ll find some too, out there. Happy Hunting,

-R.